Re: Critical hits (was Limits on armour?)

[John K Lerchey <lerchey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, one other option to the attrition system would be what starmada 
does.  Roll a damage die for each "hit" and kill off systems.  More 
attritive (is that a word?) than FT, more predictable (every damage point 
kills *some* system), but not reaonable for ships with as large a damage 
track as is avialable for FT ships. And, quite frankly, it would no longer 
feel like FT.

While FT's attrition system can be frustrating:

- threshold checks only after full rows are killed...
- threshold checks end up with random results (good dice, little or no
  systems damaged, bad dice, the whole ship can become disfunctional)...

It *is* rather unique to this game, and since all ships have to do it, 
it's reasonabley balanced.  Adding criticals, IMHO, would he hard to do. 
The idea of "for any individual weapon that scores 6 points" just begs to 
not amass dice.  I like amassing dice.  Given that there are different 
kinds of D6 results, and that some weapons have special effects (needle 
beams, for example) makes it even harder.

I consider it to be a "critical hit" when I blow a pile of threshold rolls 
and watch my ship fall apart. ;)

J

John K. Lerchey
Assistant Director for Incident Response
Information Security Office
Carnegie Mellon University

On Fri, 7 Jul 2006, Allan Goodall wrote:

> On 7/7/06, McCarthy, Tom (xwave) <Tom.McCarthy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > In FT, checking systems at the end of a row of hull boxes is a simple
> > mechanism for attrition of systems.
>
> I like attrition. I'm just not crazy about the lack of granularity in
> the FT system. The ship is perfectly okay up through the point where
> there is one hull point left on that hull row line... then things fall
> apart with one damage point suffered.
>
> That having been said, the cure is far worse than the disease from
> what I've seen.
>
> Oh, and the Command and Colors games (Memoir 44, Battle Cry, Command &
> Colors: Ancients) has an even more severe lack of granularity. An
> infantry unit has 4 figures. It is 100% effective until it loses the
> last figure, then it disappears. And yet this system is my favourite
> board game system. Go figure.
>
> --
> Allan Goodall            http://www.hyperbear.com
> agoodall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> awgoodall@xxxxxxxxx